Palin surprises
James Delingpole
Michael Palin pulls the legs off puppies for fun and next to all the awards for his round-the-world TV adventures he keeps jars of boiled babies. When he dies and they start digging up the bodies from beneath his floorboards, everyone will say: 'But he seemed such a nice man.'
Not that I have proof of any of this, you understand. But I surely can't be the only one who squirms at the carefully posed artlessness of that tanned, leanly handsome, ever-so-slightly cheeky-chappie mug smiling coyly from every sodding magazine cover from Radio Times to Reader's Digest and thinks: 'You're hiding something, you bastard.' So I was gearing up to be as infuriated by his latest travel series as I was about the last one, when he kept doing stupid, distracting, gimmicky things that no real traveller would ever do, like, oh goodness me I seem accidentally to be dressed in a sailor's costume singing a folk song with the Russian Pacific Fleet Choir, how terribly embarrassing. But then I made the mistake of watching Sahara with Michael Pa/in and discovering to my chagrin that it's actually rather good.
Did the BBC perhaps realise that they had been pushing the sub-Pythonesque anticry that little bit too far? Or is Palin growing just that little bit too long in the tooth to keep acting like Zephir the monkey in the land of the Gogottes? Whatever, though you could never accuse it of rivalling the new Mike Leigh in terms of gritty realism, the first episode did seem to strike a fairly honourable balance between glossy, ratings-grabbing celebrity travelogue and honest depiction of what it's really like to travel through a desert 'the size of the United States with the population of Norfolk'.
It took off once Palin left Morocco. Before that it was charming enough — eccentric, cockerel-owning expatriates in Tangier, lovable Moroccan church vergers saying 'Thank you very much' every five seconds, photogenic vistas of dye-vats in Fez, Berber villages — but it did rather do that cheaty thing that all travel series about Morocco do, namely, neglect to tell you how incredibly hassly the place is.
Palin's stay in the Polisario refugee camp in Tindouf, Algeria, though, was the real thing. He dined on camel, travelled with Polisario guerrillas to the heavily guarded 1,000-mile wall the Moroccans have built to keep the former inhabitants of Western Sahara out of their homeland, and gently, unhectoringly did more to publicise their plight than a dozen World In Action-style documentaries.
Mauretania was amazing, too. Having seen it I so want to go there, first because hardly anyone else has been, second because you get to wear one of those cool wraparound white turban things like in Tintin (essential for sand-storms) and third because it really does look like the Sahara is supposed to look: towering seas of golden dunes overlooked by squat, square-built crenellated forts straight out of Beau Geste.
It also provided quite the most authentic scene — the one where Palin and his crew, having booked their passage south on a twomile-long iron-ore train, jostle increasingly panic-strained with the hordes of other would-be passengers, clueless as to which coach they're supposed to be in, refused entry by jobsworth guards, terrified that the train's going to leave the station before they can board. We've all been there.
I've also been in the scene where you finally reach a semblance of civilisation in the middle of the desert and you take your first wash in days (just buckets of cold water) and you find this giant purple tick clinging to your left testicle. Well, Palin didn't get the tick experience as far as I can gather. But you can see already that even allowing for his celebrity travel budget and the occasional mid-journey R & R session in Britain, the conditions he is having to endure are not for ponces.
And maybe all this goes to explain why his series is turning out so promisingly. As I've said many times before, all TV is evil and dishonest and rarely more so than in the field of travel documentaries. Unlike travel writers, their TV equivalent can't just rely on memories and impressions of the very best bits of their journey, they have to capture it on film, and since they never know for sure when the good bits are going to happen, they have to set them up or fake them instead. This is especially true with prime-time spectaculars like Patin's travel adventures. You can't take the risk that your mass-market audience is going to get bored, so you keep having to arrange silly stunts, like the one where Patin comically pretends to have been woken up by the Gibraltar guns or the one where he hears a faint noise in the desert and, suddenly, why blow me if it isn't the Paris Dakar rally. But there does seem to have been less of this nonsense than in previous series. Maybe, they've realised that his journey is quite arduous enough, the scenery spectacular enough and the people strange enough for Palin not to have to don his Pierrot costume and frolic and gambol for the jaded monsters. Fingers crossed, eh?
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